Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to methods and apparatus for carrying out strip casting of metals. The present invention has particular applicability to twin roll casting, but may also be applied to other continuous or quasi-continuous casting processes, such as belt casting, block casting and DC (direct chill) casting.
Related Art
The present inventors have proposed the use of an electromagnetic edge dam for aluminium twin roll casting. Relevant discussion of this is set out in the reference McBrien and Allwood (2013).
Twin roll casting involves feeding liquid metal between two counter-rotating chilled rolls, where the metal solidifies and forms a sheet of uniform thickness and width. The liquid metal is commonly confined in a fixed ceramic feed system with mechanical ‘edge dams’ setting sheet width. These must be replaced after each cast, or when sheets of different widths are to be cast.
It is desirable to limit the yield loss of metal between the casting process and the formation of the final product.
McBrien and Allwood (2013) proposed a moveable electromagnetic (EM) edge dam to be used in a twin roll casting process. The non-contact nature of EM containment compared to known mechanical solutions implies a longer casting time may be achieved, while the geometry of the EM edge dam was designed so that the width of the coil may be changed by a simple displacement of the edge dam during casting.